Letters to David
Irving on this Website

Unless
correspondents ask us not to, this Website will
post selected letters that it receives and invite
open debate.

Anne
Cavendish
suspects, Tuesday, July 17, 2007, that the latest message
from al-Zawahari is a fake (and we are inclined to
agree).

Are
the latest messages from al-Zawahari faked by US
Intelligence?

WHILE
glad to learn that al-Qaeda's second-in-command, Ayman
al-Zawahiri, had expressed
a desire that you should receive
a knighthood for your work as a historian, I was even more
pleased that you should decline this dubious honour in
advance. ("We are quite happy as we are, thanks,
Ayman.")

The only "experts" to validate
these tapes have been those same intelligence agencies
whose reputation for deceiving the public is now
legendary.

Thus genuine video tapes delivered to al-Jazeera TV in
late 2001, featuring an emaciated and white-bearded OBL
disclaiming responsibility for 9/11, offer a bizarre
contrast to the November 9, 2001 video tape -- mysteriously
"discovered" by American soldiers in an abandoned house in
Jalalabad -- in which a suspiciously plump and black-bearded
OBL is suddenly found fessing up to 9/11.

Bin Laden was not a man given to lying. On September 16,
2001 he issued this message to al-Jazeera, referring to the
catastrophe of the Twin Towers:

"I stress that I have not carried out this act,
which appears to have been carried out by individuals
with their own motivation."

The real perpetrators of 9/11, in OBL's estimate, were
Israeli intelligence and their neoconservative accomplices
in America.

Such an explosive "conspiracy theory" could hardly be
allowed to take root in American minds. It was therefore
necessary to pin down the blame for 9/11 on OBL and a bunch
of jihadis armed with box-cutters. Hence the need for a
whole slew of bogus tapes in which an actor playing the part
of OBL accepts full responsibility for 9/11, thereby giving
America and Britain a pretext for pulverising the Muslim
world and plundering its resources.

BIN Laden is almost certainly dead. An obituary notice
announcing his funeral appeared in al-Wafd (an
Egyptian newspaper) on December 26, 2001. It became
perfectly safe after this date to issue bogus OBL tapes ad
nauseam, threatening the west with fire and brimstone, given
that the real OBL was no longer around to deny the
authenticity of the same tapes.

I should like to suggest that recent statements
attributed to OBL's deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, including the
suggestion that the Queen should give you a knighthood, are
also likely to be bogus. The most telling evidence is this.
Recent threats against the west are no longer emerging
exclusively from tapes delivered to al-Jazeera, but from an
entirely new source: a jihadi website called al-Hesbah. "Is
Britain longing for al-Qaeda bombings?" screams a recent
headline on this website.

According to MEMRI, the Israeli
propaganda website, al-Hesbah is one of the five most
dangerous websites in the world.

And now for the big surprise.
"The al-Hesbah chat room," a letter in The
Guardian (July 3) informs us dryly, "is registered
with a domain-registration company in Scottsdale,
Arizona, and it is one that hides the identity of the
original registrar."

The correspondent, M A Vidal, says he finds it
strange that terrorist websites should be allowed to
flourish in places like Texas and Virginia -- in short, that
Domains by Proxy should be allowed to confer anonymity on
terrorists operating on American soil, all under the
implacable eye of Homeland Security!

My conclusion? It is also possibly yours. That there is
something fishy about al-Hesbah. This "terrorist" website is
probably being run by the usual suspects! Some of its
bloodcurdling quotes sound like badly written pastiche.
("Rejoice, by Allah, London shall be bombed!") As for that
audio tape, Mr Irving, in which Ayman al-Zawahiri is so
anxious to confer a knighthood upon you, how can you be sure
this is the real al-Zawahiri speaking and not an
American/Israeli imposter?

As I write this, a new bogus bin Laden tape has been
released, together with the doubling of the bounty on OBL's
head to $50m. All these fake tapes and phoney websites are
signs of desperation. The torturers of Abu Ghraib have lost
the war on terror; and bin Laden, wherever he is, knows it
and is secretly rejoicing.